by Joan Fanshawe
(Based on Matt 15:21-28; Ps 67; Isa 56:1,6-8)
I walk from the reading lectern to the preaching lectern with a rather troubled mind. This story told in these verses from the Gospel of Matthew has been really bothering me for many days. I haven’t reached a conclusion that I feel able to preach on, even after lots of reading from many sources.
This morning I woke wanting to do a rewrite.
I do feel the message is about who is included. I do think the passage is especially relevant to the context of time and place; Matthew guiding his community of mostly Jewish believers in ‘the Way’ – new followers of Jesus – finding their way towards greater acceptance of the despised Gentiles. But I don’t know and can’t find a way of explaining away the behaviour and words of Jesus – and the disciples – in this gospel reading. It’s harsh. Is this the Jesus we want to know?
Also, I do think we hear and see such exclusionary language and attitudes not dissimilar today – from today’s apparent Jesus followers. Plus, I acknowledge that at times I do myself get impatient with people that I’ve categorised as ‘other’.
So, I have decided to look at the other readings set down to compliment the Gospel, especially the Isaiah one. It concludes, “… my house shall be called a house of prayer. Thus says the Lord God who gathers the outcasts of Israel. ‘I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.’”
I will admit to avoiding the Prophets and their long winded speeches on the whole, but this week I discovered a new insight from my morning reading. The Centre for Action and Contemplation has writers exploring ‘The Prophetic call to life’ this year, and this week I encountered a commentary on the prophets in the Old Testament by Richard Rohr, taken from his book Great Themes of Scripture, which I’d like to share.
He says:
At the centre of the prophets’ ministry is their total awareness of the transcendent God who is above all things and yet within all things. God’s presence cuts across all boundaries of space and time, and there is never any place or event from which God is absent. The prophets’ consciousness was filled with that awareness of God’s presence, a presence inescapable once they became attuned to it.
What God was doing in their hearts was loving them to life, calling them, and drawing them to God’s own heart. God had loved Israel to life when they were still enslaved and invited them to life in giving them the Torah to follow. God drew them to life when they had given up on life, in exile.
In the prophets’ own experience of the call to divine life, they could see that same pattern repeated over and over in the history of their people.
God’s call to life was, at the same time, a call to love. Drawn into the love of God, the prophets loved YHWH with all their heart and soul. They loved their own people and with clear insight saw that living in the love that is God implies hospitality to strangers, charity to the poor, justice for the oppressed. Biblical texts often mirror our own human consciousness and journey.
And now the a-ha bit for me, when Rohr says:
Life itself — and the Scriptures, including the prophets — is always three steps forward and two steps backward.
It gets the point and then loses it or doubts it.
Our job is to see where the three-steps-forward texts are heading – invariably that’s toward mercy, forgiveness, inclusion, non-violence, and trust, which gives us the ability to recognise and understand the two-steps-backward texts – which are usually about vengeance, divine pettiness, law over grace, form over substance, and technique over relationship.
For me those “violent vengeance” bits are what put me off reading those old prophets.
Maybe you feel like that too?
But over time and with re-reading and study, Rohr says we’ll begin to see the central insight which arranges the parts into a single whole.
The lived experience of God’s love is an experience of grace, overwhelming beauty, and unbelievable mercy. It is a gift of forgiveness, approval, and acceptance. To live in that love means to live in grace, to be gracious and merciful to others. It means extending to others forgiveness and approval and acceptance.
As Jesus said (at another time), it even means loving our enemies.
The prophets stood in the heart of that experience.
I can certainly see that three steps forward and two back also applies for us in our lives today. We move forward in our understanding and even in our intentions but not always in the living it out.
The important thing is to be self aware, to be willing to see another point of view and never lose hope in the restoring power of God’s love.
In our own time and place, on justice issues for the marginalised we do face challenges to consider different ways forward … how to welcome any and all wishing to be included fully at the table of life.
Just ahead we are about to elect people to form a government to lead this country. I think there’s going to be a lot of voices of discontent and even disruption, but let’s hope not a hardening of hearts and minds.
Plenty to weigh up as we try and bring the values instilled in us in response to God’s love, to our decision making and practice of life.
As that other prophet Micah proclaims, “He has told you, o mortal, what is good. Do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God.”
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